


The Era Beforehand

by BlueSpectacles



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Historical, Dialogue Heavy, Fae & Fairies, Gen, Headcanon, Other, Pagan Festivals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-19 01:33:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10629408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueSpectacles/pseuds/BlueSpectacles
Summary: So we have long since seen the ending of the King of Kings' tale. The Accursed is defeated. But what was life like for him beforehand? What about Ardyn's story, before his so-called impurities overtook him, whispering him unto the arms of an endless void? Shall you stay and listen, or shall you move on?





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set pre-game in an AU timeline, where Noctis rejects Bahamut's guidelines and joins Ardyn against the Astrals themselves, although that doesn't come into play in this particular work.  
> Variables include: Fair Folk and all they entail, Magic, and its use by all beings, headcanon for the members of houses Amicitia, Scientia, Argentum, Lucis Caelum, and a bunch of others, as well as headcanons gleaned from the endless maw of the internet and my own musings.  
> Constructive feedback is appreciated, as this is (for me) babby's first serious fan project; blatant malice will be ignored. Very likely I will go back and remaster chapters after I post the entire work, so all that stuff I just talked about is doubly important, at least to me! (And yes, chapters will get longer as the story progresses, I got a whole basket of concepts and ideas to cover in this story. The prologue is just a test drive for you to see if you can roll with my writing style.)  
> I hope you enjoy your stay in this world I've (partially) created, and if not, at least leaving with a few new ideas of your own.

The king of Lucis did not have long to live.

Izunia Lucis Caelum, a paragon of health and a shining example of masculine power, once upon a time, lay dying in a needlessly elaborate bed. His body, emaciated and warped by age, illness and magical strain, was wrapped in silk sheets.

A silver-haired man, one of his closest friends, Blaise Scientia, was beside him, monitoring the royal with a deep-set frown, punctuated by worry lines and gentle touches, adjusting pillows and blanket hems in a rather fussy manner.

“....Strategist…..it’s nearly time…..” the usurper managed to rasp, before launching into a bloody coughing fit. His mock-orderly stood to tell the others, who were waiting outside, but Izunia waved him down to sit again as the coughing subsided.

“You do not want your family here, my king?”

“No. I want them…..want them to remember me as not….quite so ill.” He chuckled a little at his self-jab, but suddenly his breathing became more labored, as though a great weight were being pushed down on his chest, torturously slow.

“Do you have any last requests, your majesty?” Blaise’s brusque tone stayed level, but his eyes betrayed his emotions; they began to dull from their usual scintillating emerald hue as a lump formed in his throat. He swallowed it.

“Two,” the king replied through a cough. Blaise, being ever-prepared, pulled a pen and paper from his jacket, but before he could settle himself again, Izunia pulled him down by the lapels with a surprisingly strong grip.

“My brother….. _Ardyn_ ……..I want him erased from history…...any records of him or his family, cleared…..the people can never know of my deception……and erase all memories of magic from before the Crystal formed……”

“A-and your second request, lord?” Blaise stuttered, after he punctuated his last sentence, written in a quick, messy scrawl.

“Let me die alone….please…...tell my wife......Juno....I love her more than all the stars in the…..in the sky…….”

The strategist stifled a sob before nodding jerkily, and he left with a lingering stride, as though Izunia might miraculously be cured in his absence, as though it would be like Orpheus and Eurydice, as long as he didn't look back everything would turn out alright.

 

That didn't happen. Not even close, I'm afraid.

 

Royal records state that Izunia Lucis Caelum, the first king of Lucis, died of his illnesses, the Ring of the Lucii, and old battle wounds early in the morning at Samhain. All of them are false. This is what really happened.

* * *

 

Shortly after Blaise left, there was a noise at the window. Izunia’s breath rattled in his ribcage, and his body protested as he sat himself up with a wince, searching the dim chamber with weary eyes for an intruder.

A tall, vaguely human figure wearing a long coat swirled into the room, dead leaves dancing in the breeze and landing at their boots.

“My, my, brother dear….we’re looking the absolute picture of health this Sabbat, aren’t we?” Izunia’s eyes widened with recognition at the stranger’s smoky, harvest-sickle rasp.

“A-Ardyn? Is that really you-” His murky cobalt eyes welled with latent tears as he coughed again, but as the estranged man moved into lantern light, his brow furrowed.

“That can’t be possible. It’s been 50...50 years since you were….”  
“Murdered by my own blood?” Ardyn arched a tailored brow, smiling a little standoffishly.

“W-well, yes…..but you must be an apparition, a figment of my imagination, a spirit that missed the trip home to the Old Country after my brother died.”

The standing man removed his odd chapeau from a once vibrant, curly coif dulled to wine-red, laying it on the bedside table and sitting on the mattress; he held out the remnants of an old, dove grey cloak, patterned with black roses, for his brother to rub between old, calloused fingers.

“So…..you’re real, then?”

“I’m afraid so.” The usurper looked up at him, fearful, but the elder brother managed to quell his emotions, and soften his amber gaze from a bonfire to candlelight, so as not to spook his younger sibling so close to the end.

“You have questions. Allow me to answer them.” Ardyn rose from Izunia’s deathbed, and sat on the windowsill, his focus outside on the festival in the city below.

“When I arrived at the foot of Bahamut, still very much afraid of death, the first thing I did was grieve. For myself, for you, for the inevitable deaths of Melusine and Somnus and all the loyalists, for….my old friends. One more thing which you stole from me, now that I think about it.”

“But I-”  
“Shush. Listen. I didn’t get to finish before I felt a tug towards the sky. Or up. Or whatever direction it was. And I saw Bahamut for the first time.”

“He told me that I had done well in my time on Eos, and I thought that meant he would let me go. But then he apologized for my execution, and then I thought _that_ was when I would leave. After a whole string of apologies and compliments, I knew that he was hiding something from me. I tried to leave on my own.”  
“And then Bahamut, whom I’d worshiped essentially since I drew my first breath in this world, whom I’d thought would welcome me into his arms at the hour of my death…...he told me that I wouldn’t be going to the Astral Plane. _Or_ Ifrit’s domain, for that matter.” Ardyn’s teeth grit, and his hands closed into fists.

“He told me that I was the Accursed, as chosen by the prophecy. Heaven didn’t want me, and neither did Hell; I was too impure for either. And I did _exactly_ as he told me to. I went among the people. I held their hands. I ate their vices and drank their sins.”  
“I cupped my hands in the polluted twilight that the subconscious rivers of their minds had been twisted into by that _blasted_ Scourge, and I drank _far_ past my fill, until the rivers were pure again, and it was I who was polluted.” Angry tears began to flow, but Ardyn didn’t care; he had never spoken to anyone about this grave injustice before, and his wrath could've permanently boiled the snow on a mountain summit. Gods know how he managed to keep himself quiet enough in order to stay undetected by anyone outside.

“It **_HURT_ ** , Izunia. The more daemons I absorbed, the more pain it caused me to remove them from others. Oh, at first, it was only static shock, but just before you betrayed me, I tasted blood in my mouth and felt fire on my skin!” Izunia turned his face away, ashamed and cowardly.

“So then,” the supposedly dead man spat, after a pregnant pause, “He put me back here on this wretched plane, my wife and child gone, and all those who might help me dead or ‘missing’.”

He leaned against the supporting wall of marble, holding a hand to his forehead and closing his eyes, head tilted back.

“And now I hear that you plan to obliterate me from the annals of the past. And you won’t allow your people to know of the Fair Folk ever again, or a time where all your subjects could use magic, until you hoarded it all for your family.”  
“I can….tell Blaise not to…..but….”  
“No, brother. You’re almost _dead_ anyways. What good would it do you to tax yourself further?”

Ardyn’s voice broke, but he left the sill, wiping tears away with the sleeve of his ornate coat and returning to his previous spot by his nearly-gone brother; Ardyn looked at the usurper with a new emotion, sadness, in his eyes, and carded his fingers through the near-white locks on his brother’s head, in what seemed to the dying one like a loving gesture; his other hand reached into the blackness beneath his coat.

“It’s better like that, you know,” the former healer muttered, almost singsong, looking down.  
“Why?”  
“Then nobody will be able to trace this back to me.” A flash of silver in the light of the rising harvest moon, then the sound of metal puncturing skin.

A clean jab, under the ribs, right up to the heart. A little blood trickled from the corner of the old man’s mouth. Ardyn’s voice was a scathing hiss as he whispered into his brother’s ear.

“I may afford _you_ mercy now, but I want you to know that I shan’t do the same for any of your descendants. I’ll make sure I’m always three steps ahead of them, and you will watch them from the Astral plane and you will be _powerless_ ,” he twisted the knife unconsciously, “to help them. They will undergo their trials, and they will be good kings and queens, yes, mayhaps even great ones. But in your hubris, in combining all magic into that _damned_ Crystal…….they will ultimately fall by your hand. By the words I speak this eve, they _will_ find the Ring of the Lucii, the Royal Arms, all of it, too much of a burden to bear. All because you wanted to make them gods among men.”

He pulled the dagger out, wanting to shield his ears from the noise as the sounds of muscle tearing and blood spurting filled them; a dark stain began to spread underneath Izunia’s nightshirt, his face frozen in an expression of betrayal and surprise.

After closing his brother’s eyes, two cloudy blue things that seemed to watch his every move, Ardyn cradled the usurper’s head in his lap, and for a while, he cried; not out of sadness alone, but out of grief, out of rage and heartbreak. When the tears wouldn't come anymore, he rose, washing his face and hands in the basin of water on the vanity, the counter dusty from disuse.

He took a good long look at himself in the attached mirror. His face had gone through quite the metamorphosis since he last saw himself in a palace looking glass; soft, impish features hardened into mischievous angles by time and stress. Everything was almost unwelcoming now, due to how his face had become unreadable. Intelligent eyes, rimmed red from crying, chilled from honey to gold. High cheekbones, a sharp jaw…..the only soft things about him nowadays were the curling, ruddy ends of his hair. He returned a third time to the bed and placed the knife into his brother’s left hand, but suddenly, as he curled the uncannily relaxed fingers around the handle, he noticed the ring.

It glinted wickedly in the moonlight. He could still hear the countless voices of the Gentry whispering words of empty power and endless magic, and its call quite nearly seduced him into putting it on.

But a holy man isn’t supposed to succumb to worldly vices.

Instead, he removed the last protection charm, the sigil of the Kingsglaive, from its braid in his hair; he laid it on the bedside table, cringing as it jingled a little against the wood, far too merrily for the situation.

Hearing footsteps, he turned to go, retrieving his hat; but he looked back at the corpse with a heavy sigh. The knob began to turn; he regloved his hands and opted to use the rose trellis instead of the tree for his escape.

As he was descending, he heard Amaryllis, who wasn't prone to showing sadness, mind, let out a choked wail as her eyes fell on the dead king. It gave him chills as he heard her grieving cries sing out, like a swan song, from the opened window; come to think of it, this was the first time he had heard her cry. He hurried a little faster down the wall, fingers pricking on decaying thorns; he hit the stone of the western courtyard a little too hard. 

And so he started down into Insomnia.


End file.
